You cannot use the Reverse Engineer Wizard on certain DBMS database in Visio 2003

When you try to use the Reverse Engineer Wizard in Microsoft Office Visio 2007 or in Microsoft Office Visio 2003 to connect to a database, you may receive an error message dialog box that only contains an exclamation mark (!) character.

This problem may occur if Visio does not support the Database management system (DBMS) database type. The following is a list of the DBMS database types that are not supported by Visio:

• IBM DB2 Universal Database 6.x
• IBM DB2 Universal Database 7.x
• IBM DB2 Universal Database 8.x
• IBM Informix Dynamic Server 9.x
• Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise 12.x
• Oracle Server 9
• Oracle Server10g

Note These DBMS database types are not supported because they have not been tested with Visio.

To work around this issue, use the ODBC Generic Driver option to reverse engineer an unsupported DBMS database type. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Install the open database connectivity (ODBC) driver of the unsupported DBMS database. For more information about how to install the ODBC driver of the unsupported DBMS database, see the documentation that is provided with the unsupported DBMS database.
2. On the File menu, point to New, point to Database, and then click either Database Model Diagram (Metric) or Database Model Diagram (U.S. units).
3. On the Database menu, click Reverse Engineer.
4. On the first screen of the Reverse Engineer Wizard, click ODBC Generic Driver in the Installed Visio drivers list.
5. Click Setup.
6. In the ODBC Generic Driver Setup box, click the required ODBC driver in the Select the ODBC drivers to use list, and then click OK.
7. Click New to create a new data source, and then follow the instructions that appear on the screen. If the data source is already available, continue to step 8.
8. In the Data Sources list, click the required data source name.
9. Click Next.
10. Follow the instructions that appear on the screen to finish the Reverse Engineer Wizard and to extract the database schema.

Note This work around may not work with all unsupported DBMS database schemas. Additionally, you may not have the same schema in the database diagram that you receive.

Visio does include database drivers for the following supported DBMS programs:

• IBM DB2 Universal Database 2.12
• IBM DB2 Universal Database 5.0
• IBM Informix-SE Database Server 5.0
• IBM Informix-SE Database Server 6.0
• IBM Informix-SE Database Server 7.x
• IBM Informix-OnLine Dynamic Server 7.x
• Microsoft Access 97
• Microsoft Access 2000
• Microsoft Access 2002
• Microsoft Office Access 2003
• Microsoft SQL Server 6.x
• Microsoft SQL Server 7.0
• Microsoft SQL Server 2000
• Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise 10
• Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise 11
• Oracle Server 7.x
• Oracle Server 8.x

For more information about the formats in which you can export Microsoft Visio shapes and drawings in Visio 2003, click Microsoft Office Visio Help on the Help menu, type in the Office Assistant or the Answer Wizard, and then click Search to view the topics returned.

For more information about how to troubleshoot database reverse engineering related issues, click the following article numbers to view the articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: The third-party products that this article discusses are manufactured by companies that are independent of Microsoft. Microsoft makes no warranty, implied or otherwise, regarding the performance or reliability of these products.